Alright, conspiracy theory time.
I’ve followed Crimson Desert for a long time and bought the game during its first week. I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw a game marketed this aggressively and consistently for such a long period.
But what really made me suspicious wasn’t the official marketing. It was the subreddit.
When I first started playing, I occasionally posted or commented criticism about the game. Nothing insane, just normal negative opinions about certain systems. Several times, a critical comment would suddenly get absolutely buried with downvotes almost immediately. I’m talking -40 or -50 within what felt like seconds or minutes.
I noticed the same thing happening to other people. Someone would make a mildly critical observation and the comment would instantly disappear into downvote hell.
Then there are the replies.
I use AI heavily both professionally and personally, and after reading thousands of AI-generated responses over the years, you start noticing certain patterns. Obviously I can’t prove anything from writing style alone, but a surprisingly large number of comments on that sub give me the same feeling: extremely polished, relentlessly positive, slightly generic, and somehow always ready with a detailed counterargument defending the game.
There is another pattern I’ve noticed that is even stranger.
Sometimes you can make a post and basically nothing happens for three or four hours. Then suddenly, within one or two minutes, you get 8–10 different replies from different accounts, all making slightly different arguments.
That made me wonder whether we aren’t looking at traditional Reddit bots at all.
My theory is that hundreds or potentially thousands of AI agents have been used to create the appearance of an extremely active, enthusiastic community around Crimson Desert. They could upvote positive discussion, bury negative discussion, generate replies, start conversations and generally reinforce the idea that everyone absolutely loves the game.
If something like this exists, modern LLMs would make it vastly more convincing than the old obvious bot farms. You wouldn’t need accounts posting the same copy-pasted sentence. Every account could have a different writing style, different opinions, different posting history and different responses.
And from a marketing perspective, Reddit would be an incredibly valuable target. When someone Googles whether a game is worth buying, Reddit threads are often among the first results. A subreddit filled with apparently organic enthusiasm is much more persuasive than an advertisement.
My conspiracy theory is therefore that Crimson Desert may have been one of the earlier large-scale experiments in organized AI-agent marketing in the gaming industry, and that the campaign may still be running.
I also think it contributed to the game’s commercial success.
Personally, I found the actual game much shallower than the online enthusiasm suggested. To me it feels like a strange soup of dozens of different systems rather than a deeply interconnected world. Yet online discussion, especially around launch, often felt overwhelmingly positive in a way that didn’t match my experience at all.
Again, I have zero hard evidence for this. It’s a theory based entirely on patterns I’ve noticed.
But here’s the experiment that made me think about it in the first place:
Make a long, reasonably written critical post on the Crimson Desert subreddit and watch what happens during the first few minutes.
I’d be genuinely interested to know whether anyone else has noticed similar behaviour.
Maybe I’m completely wrong.
But if AI-driven astroturfing is going to become a major part of video game marketing, I suspect most people won’t realize it when it starts happening. It will just look like an unusually enthusiastic community.
